Heartbeats
by kaegulkeroki
Summary: When Fakir can't bury his feelings for Ahiru anymore, he loses control, calling her back from her fairytale ending. Rated M for angst and possible future sexual themes.


Caramel skin, smooth over the tight, wiry muscles hugging the lithe, dark dancer's frame, slowly rose and fell with each shallow breath. Ahiru watched the boy with a hesitant longing... to reach out and hold him. But instead she pulled the warm duck down blanket up to his chin. He was so strong, yet also so frail, like all living things. His heart, his miraculous heart, had almost given out, but it had also broken the boundaries of this world and brought her back from exile. The room seemed to fill with the sound of the beats over which their lives played: rising, falling, crescendo, diminuendo... forte!

His long, black lashes fluttered and emerald green eyes looked up into hers, muddled at confronting the waking world.

"Fakir!" she whispered, her breath catching somewhere in the back of her dry throat. Quickly, she dabbed a waiting cloth soaked with hot water over his forehead.

"Ahiru?..." he gazed unbelievingly up at her, then his face transformed. The look was somehow a mix of utter sadness and joy, underscored by remorse. "You came back..."

"Of course I did, silly." She smiled down at him, her eyes blurred by stray tears. She didn't even know what she felt anymore, but she knew she loved being here, human, with Fakir.

* * *

He felt guilty. Guilty for calling her back to him and to life in Kinkan Town. It had been over six years, and she had moved on. He knew he should have done the same, after all he was a human and she was a duck. If it wasn't for Drosselmeyer, their lives would never have intertwined. Although, if it wasn't for Drosselmeyer, he wasn't sure he would ever have recognized who he really was. Fakir: above all a writer, a storyteller and a hopeless romantic. He was still a knight, still wildly protective, still honorable and deadly. But in the years after Drosselmeyer, he learned to dance that path with dignity and control rather than anger and angst as he strove to give back the inhabitants of Kinkan Town their own voices in their own stories.

But on Ahiru, he had still been stuck. She was last, the very last. But, finally, he wrote her the story she deserved, he let her grow and let her go away from him and the life they once knew. As she aged, she found another duck, he saw them together, nestled in the reeds, long after she had stopped coming to his little pier. She seemed to have forgotten him. He didn't know, after all, how duck's minds worked outside the imposed fairytale narrative. He thought if Drosselmeyer could impose thoughts and emotions, maybe he could learn to write his heartache away.

So he wrote. Wrote until his hands bled and his mind was numb. He wrote about people who didn't exist, about wonderful adventures and happy endings. On and on he wrote, spinning a thousand and one tales to stall his impending emotions.

Until one evening, he couldn't write another word. Fakir hung his head, ink-stained fists clenching tightly until his knuckles turned white. All the happy endings he had penned, all the wonderful adventures, and at least one of them, even the most modest and boring, should have been his! He couldn't block the memories of her anymore, and they came flooding back with a vengeance. He felt selfish and reckless, somewhere in the back of his mind he knew his emotions were spiraling out of control, but his self-pity was blinding. He thought of their tense conversations, their rivalry, their teamwork, their pas de duex. In his mind's eye he saw her as she had been all those years ago, in all her understated ginger beauty, awkwardly growing into her ballerina shoes, her infuriatingly loud and persistant presence, the warmth of her love ... for the prince... overcoming all.

His heart was rending in two. He couldn't take it anymore. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, scribbled sideways on a blank sheet of paper, "Please! Hear me_" as he bolted out of the suffocating heat of his cottage with a quill and paper in hand, running headlong towards a small, misty pond in the woods and clutching his chest.

Dark trees slid by in the periphery of his downturned vision, witnesses to the crime he was about to commit. Chill dew collected on his hair, dripping into his face, maybe mingling with angry tears, as he neared the still waters. And suddenly, he was there. Right on the edge of the lake he collapsed, flattening his paper to the damp bank before him as he fell onto his knees. His hand poised over the paper for what seemed like eternity, then, with a feverish downward thrust, it began scribbling madly. "Ahiru heard a voice calling-" But before he could finish the sentence, he had a horrible moment of clarity. Mimicking an act he had performed before, he wrenched the sharp quill from his still-moving fingers and drove it through his writing hand and straight into the earth below.

The pain released him. He lifted his face to the starry night and cried in agony, "Ahiru! Oh god," he sobbed, "Ahiru, I love you!" And he fell silent, his eyes closed, letting the pain and starlight wash over him, numb him, willing himself to forget that he had almost written his most precious charge into another story of her unwilling. The catharsis was so overwhelming that he didn't even notice the bright, red shard that left his chest and floated away across the water.

* * *

Ahiru was sleeping in the reeds when she heard the commotion. Her partner ruffled his feathers with a scowl, but remained deep in some troubling dream. It had been very quick, a rapid pounding, like a man running, which had suddenly stopped, followed by a tortured howl and four short words that froze her heart.

"Ahiru, I love you!"

She knew that voice, although she couldn't quite remember from whence in her blurred past it had come. For some reason, she thought the voice had been calling to her... but how could that be? What man would be calling to a duck? Her life had been nothing but blissfully peaceful days on the lake, plenty of watercress and, recently, Bill, who despite all appearances, was perfect. They were meant to be, as only two ducks can.

He had found her, floating absent-minded across the lake, unable to remember where she had come from one sunny day. He helped her find the best spots for grazing and hand-outs, which spots to avoid at all costs due to cats, and taught her to how to be a duck again. Although, Ahiru thought, since I am a duck, it's odd that I didn't know already. That thought was quickly brushed aside however, as her friendship with Bill deepened. Even when she no longer needed his tutelage, they would still spend every day together. Soon enough, the touch of his bill had become slightly more than just a playful nudge, and together they experienced their first mutual and loving romance.

Bill loved Ahiru. He had no trouble admitting it. But something was off, like Ahiru wasn't quite present, like their life was somehow like a wonderful, but fleeting dream. He wanted to go forward with their relationship; he could easily imagine a family in their future and a life together. But deep in his heart, he was hesitant, and he couldn't bring himself to ask her until he was certain. This night he dreamed of fuzzy, yellow ducklings, floating in line after their mother, but a fog kept coming in, obscuring them all from view. He scowled.

Ahiru looked curiously around, wondering if the voice would come again. Even though it did not, she felt compelled to venture out from the reeds, squinting through the heavy mist. A red light was hovering over the lake, hazy in the fog. Surprisingly unalarmed, as if the sight were familiar as the sun that rose every day, she swam towards it until she saw it for what it was: a blood-red jewel, sharp and bulky as if a large ruby had been roughly cleaved. A sense of overwhelming deja vu came over her as she gazed into its core. And as suddenly as that, she remembered. Green eyes glaring from beneath dark hair, anger and loss, his impenetrable defenses, his tears, his perfect form, his sacrifice. Her life as a girl, as Princess Tutu. She remembered!

She knew why the heart shard was there now, knew that Fakir had ripped it out of himself with the power of his emotion, knew that it was for her and her alone. As it all came rushing back, she almost forgot the sleeping duck she'd left in the reeds. There was a soft quack and the sound of gently splashing water, the light of the shard had woken him. Ahiru turned to face Bill, uncertain now, as she had often been before, what to do and who she was.

Bill could feel his heart sinking, that somehow his dream had been an ugly premonition, when he saw the red light. It was unnatural, unfitting for a duck's eye. It was dangerous and powerful, intensely passionate, full of tortured longing. He knew it would persist for eons, an eternity. It disturbed him. Yet there she was, his angel, his Ahiru, haloed by that god-awful light. And he knew their life would never be the same.

"Bill..." Ahiru started, then faltered...

He looked on grimly, saying nothing.

"I... I remembered," she continued, "I was a girl. Up at the ballet academy. I... there was another life. So many things happened, Bill. I forgot because he... a writer - he wrote all our stories, and saved us from a terrible fate. He didn't want me to suffer as a duck who would always long to be a girl. Bill..."

Somehow he knew it was true, just as he knew Ahiru was going to leave him. Bill could feel the hot anger welling up inside him. So what was he? Just some bump on the road? Did this so-called "writer" write him too? Was he just some pawn in Ahiru's story? It wasn't fair! It wasn't fair at all!

"So you're returning to him. He found a way to turn you back into a girl?" The words felt vicious, tearing him up as they came from his mouth.

"No I... I don't think he meant to... I mean, I don't know if I will turn into a girl. I think it was an accident that I remembered, he wouldn't intentionally undo the story he made for me..." Ahiru looked down in shame. She felt horrible. All this time she had loved, yes really loved and adored Bill for the life he had helped her rebuild on the lake... but it was a different way of life. And with her memories restored, she desired only to be a girl again. She was torn. Life had been wonderful on the lake, so peaceful, like a dream. Life up there in Kinkan Town, well, she didn't know what to expect. If only she could go back... forget. But she knew she could never forget, never return to the dreamy bliss a third time, and she didn't want to.

"I'm sorry, Bill. I can't forget anymore." The tears slipped silently from her eyes.

"As you wish," he said, almost too calmly. And without a backward glance he turned and swam into the darkness, rushing into his own despair, loathing every particle of Fakir's being.

Ahiru looked up in time to see Bill's tail fade into the night. She sat for a while, lost in her thoughts. At last, grimly determined, she turned her face up towards the shard and spread her wings, lifting off gracefully from the water to meet its red light mid-air and accept Fakir's love.

* * *

Fakir had slumped sideways onto the damp shore, soaked to the bone, but not caring. It wasn't sleep that claimed him, but he was tired and emotionally drained. As he lay there, attempting to think of nothing, a white light seemed to rise from the lake coming closer until it finally engulfed his entire field of vision. Fakir squinted, and when his eyes adjusted, he realized with a shock like lightning that stopped his heart who it was.

In a moment of eternity before the oxygen in his brain ran out, he saw her clearly, as glorious as an angel in a halo of soft light. Her ginger hair unbraided, cascading in curls around her developed form, red tendrils falling softly on round, bare breasts, down her stomach, as she leaned in towards him. He saw himself reflected in her bright cerulean eyes and the gentle, smiling curve of her lips, and darkness overcame him.


End file.
